When I started blogging — sometime in 1998 or 1999 — it was really exciting to have access to this ”instant publication” medium online; instead of waiting weeks or even months for magazine articles to appear, you could have something up and running, and in front of readers in a matter of minutes.
The excitement of instant publication, and being able to post ”a body of work” gradually gave way to the question ”Is anyone actually READING my stuff? Am I just shouting into an empty space?”
Maybe we try to tell ourselves that we are just doing it "for the love of writing," but that's not entirely true, is it? After all, why publish something, if it weren't your intention that someone read it?
Early blogging was somewhat complicated. The initial iterations required bloggers to install a separate utility if they wanted people to be able to actually leave comments. And visitors couldn't just leave comments, they had to go register an account with the comment utility.
Note to self: When people complain about Hive being complicated, remind them that the earliest days of BLOGGING were also complicated!
Anyway, back then getting a pair of eyeballs on your creative writing took a lot of effort. ”Page views” could often be counted on a pair of hands, and if 20 people looked at my stuff it was kind of exciting!
We have come a long way since then.
I was looking at the visitor logs for my oldest blog (active since 2002) and my three most popular posts over the years all have over 20,000 views per post. Which is quite a contrast to how often my posts here on Hive are viewed, although I have no way to look back at page views over the years to make comparisons.
That said, I do know that the people who get the daily ”most upvoted” badge from @hivebuzz tend to get 1200-1500 votes… and most of us are well aware that 90% of those votes are the result of automated curation, not actual people looking at a post.
One of my (non-specific) ambitions for 2025 is to get more engagement on my posts. Which might mean a return to an old practice of asking direct questions of readers, at the end of the post... actively inviting dialogue.
It might also mean making more use of recent features/services such as @commentrewarder to help boost engagement.
I have to say, though, that I really miss @abh12345's Curation and Engagement Leagues, which really was one of the best engagement generators Hive has ever had... by encouraging people to participate in engagement as a game. It was great because Asher actually developed algorithms to rate the difference between a "nice post" type comment, and a long and relevant piece of feedback in a comment.
I suppose this has long been one of my talking points because my entire reason for being here — in the first place — was tied to my long-time love of those early blogging days where we called it social blogging.
We shared stories about our lives, or the human condition, or our interests... and then discussed it.
It might have been clever by Facebook/Meta to declare "all you have to do is give it a thumbs up!" as if eliminating the need to actually talk to each other was a feature, rather than a setback!
Of course, before you can have a conversation about something, people have to read it...
And so, perhaps the challenge is twofold:
We have to get people to read our stuff — by making it interesting and compelling — and then we have to get people from outside Hive's borders to not only show up, but also be intrigued enough that they want to go through the protracted circus of creating (and understanding!) a Hive account.
Tall order? We can but give it a try!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2024.12.27 00:17 PST
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